A big problem that people have with the Formac Studio TVR hardware is that when it saves the files to your hard drive, it takes at least 10gb of space for a half hour show. Well, being frustrated by working on these large files, I finally figured out that iMovie recognized the Formac as a camera.

Open iMovie and turn your Formac on and switch to camera mode. Then hit the Play button to start getting a feed through your iMovie window. Your Formac controller will pop-up in iMovie, so you can select what channel you wish to record from or use composite or S-Video. Then just simply hit import. I now import a half hour show in just under 4.7GB. When I am done, I clip out what I don't want and then export it to a QuickTime .mov file. The resulting file size would be about 900mb or 1Gb, which enables me to fit more shows onto a DVD.

Formac's software defaults to DV format for files, but you can easily set it to any other codec in preferences. MPEG-4 files are quite a bit smaller. With the settings I use, about 1.5GB per hour. Not DVD quality, but for offline viewing it's fine.